Is testing taking over our schools? An entire faculty says yes

WHAT IS FIRST PERSON?

In the First Person section, we feature informed perspectives from readers who have firsthand experience with the school system. View submission guidelines here and contact our community editor to submit a piece.

Imagine your first day at a new school. You are surrounded by new faces and new teachers and are navigating a new building. What are you concerned about? Making new friends? Liking your new teachers?

When they enter our school each fall, our sixth-graders write about their hopes and fears for middle school. This year, 35 percent said their greatest fear was failing the state tests. At one of the most socially difficult times of their lives, over a third of our children have more anxiety about standardized tests than any other issue.

What has happened?

We — the teachers of a public secondary school in New York City — are writing because we wish you to join us in asking this question about what’s happening in our schools. We ask you to consider our experiences and the experiences of our students in a world where schools face more standardized tests and increasing pressures related to their outcomes than ever before.

This year in our school, as in schools across the country, we have seen the number of standardized tests we are required to administer grow sharply, from 25 to more than 50 (in grades 6-10). In the next six weeks alone, each of our sixth-graders will be required to take 18 days of tests: three days of state English tests, three days of state math tests, four days of new city English and math benchmark tests, and eight days of new English, math, social studies and science city tests to evaluate teacher performance. Additionally, students who are learning English must spend two to three more days taking the NYSESLAT test for English Language Learners — a total of 21 days in just the next few weeks.

Consider your own education. Yes, high-school students have always faced college entrance and graduation exams. But as elementary or middle-school students prior to the federal No Child Left Behind law and Race to the Top competition, you likely had no more than a few days of standardized testing every spring (if that). For today’s students, however, these standardized tests have become a centerpiece of their educational experience. Time spent on these tests is time not spent on learning or teaching. The centrality of testing should be shocking, but instead is somehow accepted as commonplace.

One teacher at our school asked her seventh-graders how they felt about the tests. The word “scared” came up multiple times, as did the word “hate.”

“I feel nervous,” said one, “because you think you’re not going to pass.” Another protested, “I don’t think tests show our learning, and they don’t show our growth.” A third stated, “It makes it more possible to fail.”

If this seems overly dramatic, consider that in New York City, 70 percent of students last year were labeled “failing.” This is not, as many believe, a function of low performance, but a deliberate decision by the state to increase the number of students labeled “failing” in a move that has created more pressure on teachers and schools, and public support for new — untested — reform initiatives. We question the collateral consequences of such a mechanism for educational change.

Let us be clear at the outset: as a staff, we are not opposed to all standardized tests and believe that, used sparingly, such tests can provide useful feedback to schools, teachers and possibly students. We are instead concerned about their vast and increasing number and — just as disconcerting — outsized influence. The tests are no longer about feedback. The stakes attached to them now commonly include school funding and evaluation and closure, teacher pay and evaluation and firings, and of course student promotion and self-perception. It should come as no surprise that many schools have chosen to focus more and more of the school year on what is often called “test prep.”

Consider the case of two of our U.S. history teachers who sought to engage students in a case study about Fred Korematsu and the ways in which the rights of U.S. citizens have been suspended in times of war. At the last minute, worried about the impending Regents Exam, these teachers felt compelled to drop this important, in-depth investigation that would tap into student passions and diversity. Instead, they made the difficult decision to “cover” a broad and sanitized survey of U.S. foreign policy from the Monroe Doctrine to the Cold War.

As it turns out, the thematic essay on last year’s U.S. History Regents test was on American foreign policy, and the vast majority of our students passed the test. Did we make the right decision?

What does it mean to “test-prep” students as a means for teaching them to read and write? It means to teach without context or commitment, without personal connection or application. It means to teach using excerpted writing passages and scripted questions. David Coleman, architect of the Common Core standards that serve as the basis for the latest tests, shared his opinion that “as you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.” A curriculum based on standardized tests implies that our students’ lives, our lives, and the vibrant lives of our communities just don’t seem to matter.

In contrast, as teachers we recognize every day that there is no true curriculum without students’ lives, engagement, and voices.

One of the central characteristics of our school has been that all content and skills are embedded in real-world curriculums. We have a common understanding that students produce better work when they believe it is meaningful, when academic work spills into the world and back again. Our students make presentations to elementary-school students about bullying and to hospital institutional review boards about medical research proposals. They work with the Metropolitan Transit Authority on bus engine design, and with the Queens Memory Project on interviewing and preserving immigrants’ stories in Queens.

They may spend weeks on a single case study, developing nuanced understandings of complex problems. In this work, they are evaluated by school-based assessments that, in contrast to standardized tests, take the shape of diverse projects and presentations. Standards, including the Common Core, are a central part of our curriculum work, but they are only one of many considerations embedded in the work our students do.

As external pressure increases to sacrifice curriculum for the sake of “test prep,” all of us have been forced to make difficult decisions. We often hear policymakers tell us that a strong curriculum will result in strong test scores. This is simply not true. Standardized tests are, by definition, tests removed from student engagement and context; they require a particular kind of teaching that is antithetical to what most of us believe education should be. Many of us as teachers think of test prep as unprofessional and unethical. All of us believe curriculum should never begin or end with standardized tests.

This year, we took a stand on this point by subverting the evaluation of our teachers based on standardized tests. A new mandate in New York City — an indirect result of Race to the Top — requires each teacher to be evaluated by two standardized tests, most of us for at least one subject we don’t teach (the city recommended that schools evaluate their music teachers, for example, based on English and math scores). It also dramatically increased the number of tests and used tests that had never been piloted. We found this untenable.

When the city asked us to choose two standardized tests for each teacher as part of her or his evaluation, we all agreed to assign ourselves the same tests wherever possible. For one of the tests, all of our middle-school teachers will be evaluated on the state English test for all of our students. The result: students will take the minimum number of new tests, and teachers will all receive the same score. If our students fail, all of us will fail together. In this decision, we affirm our belief that we are a teaching community that collaborates and shares curricula, not a collection of individual good or bad teachers. We will not have our entire school community bound to a barrage of tests.

It is a small but important act of resistance.

So how might all of us, as citizens with a stake in our schools, resist the narrowing of curriculum and students’ lives? First, it is clear to us that our elected officials must hear from more than principals and teachers that creating new tests and tying more consequences to those tests cannot be the core of any education reform plan.

Second, some of us are also supportive of the opt-out movement that is growing across the country, wherein parents have creatively removed their children from standardized testing. In doing so, they refuse districts and states the data with which to evaluate students, teachers and schools based on standardized tests.

Some of us are more ambivalent about this movement. But we all know that to move forward, we must do more than say no to a system in which we do not believe. We seek systems where assessments can be effective at supporting students, systems where assessments are valid, reliable and fair. Based on our experiences, we have come to believe that these systems must be built through the work of individual schools, not through large-scale standardized tests.

We suggest that policymakers begin by moving resources away from standardized test creation and toward supporting the development of quality assessments in schools. Perhaps they might create incentives for schools to design their own school-based assessments, or encourage schools to move toward performance- and project-based assessment practices shared strategically among schools (see, for example, the New York Performance Standards Consortium of schools).

We cannot emphasize enough that any school’s capacity to develop is profoundly related to the allocation of school resources. Our school invests in lower student-teacher ratios, increased hours of teacher collaboration each week, and a week of paid curriculum development before the school year begins. Each year we struggle to find this funding, and we have often fallen short of our goal.

This week, as our school enters another season of testing, our sixth- and eighth-grade teachers have chosen to read to students a principal’s letter that one parent posted online: “We are concerned that these tests do not always assess all of what it is that make each of you special and unique … the scores you get will tell you something, but they will not tell you everything. There are many ways of being smart.”

Our students cheered. That they could be seen as individuals with interests and friends and dreams — not just as a set of numbers — deeply resonated with them.

At the end of the day, we hope students see their educations not only as a means to graduate, jumpstart their careers or get into college, but as a means to investigate, interact with and innovate in a rapidly changing world. As John Dewey reminds us, “Education is not preparation for life, but life itself.” We believe in a curriculum that is rich and personal — that is, for the living. To treat curriculum and schools otherwise is to demean education, reducing it to no more than training or indoctrination in a world that needs people to be so much more.

WHAT IS FIRST PERSON?

In the First Person section, we feature informed perspectives from readers who have firsthand experience with the school system. View submission guidelines here and contact our community editor to submit a piece.

Imagine your first day at a new school. You are surrounded by new faces and new teachers and are navigating a new building. What are you concerned about? Making new friends? Liking your new teachers?

When they enter our school each fall, our sixth-graders write about their hopes and fears for middle school. This year, 35 percent said their greatest fear was failing the state tests. At one of the most socially difficult times of their lives, over a third of our children have more anxiety about standardized tests than any other issue.

What has happened?

We — the teachers of a public secondary school in New York City — are writing because we wish you to join us in asking this question about what’s happening in our schools. We ask you to consider our experiences and the experiences of our students in a world where schools face more standardized tests and increasing pressures related to their outcomes than ever before.

This year in our school, as in schools across the country, we have seen the number of standardized tests we are required to administer grow sharply, from 25 to more than 50 (in grades 6-10). In the next six weeks alone, each of our sixth-graders will be required to take 18 days of tests: three days of state English tests, three days of state math tests, four days of new city English and math benchmark tests, and eight days of new English, math, social studies and science city tests to evaluate teacher performance. Additionally, students who are learning English must spend two to three more days taking the NYSESLAT test for English Language Learners — a total of 21 days in just the next few weeks.

Consider your own education. Yes, high-school students have always faced college entrance and graduation exams. But as elementary or middle-school students prior to the federal No Child Left Behind law and Race to the Top competition, you likely had no more than a few days of standardized testing every spring (if that). For today’s students, however, these standardized tests have become a centerpiece of their educational experience. Time spent on these tests is time not spent on learning or teaching. The centrality of testing should be shocking, but instead is somehow accepted as commonplace.

One teacher at our school asked her seventh-graders how they felt about the tests. The word “scared” came up multiple times, as did the word “hate.”

“I feel nervous,” said one, “because you think you’re not going to pass.” Another protested, “I don’t think tests show our learning, and they don’t show our growth.” A third stated, “It makes it more possible to fail.”

If this seems overly dramatic, consider that in New York City, 70 percent of students last year were labeled “failing.” This is not, as many believe, a function of low performance, but a deliberate decision by the state to increase the number of students labeled “failing” in a move that has created more pressure on teachers and schools, and public support for new — untested — reform initiatives. We question the collateral consequences of such a mechanism for educational change.

Let us be clear at the outset: as a staff, we are not opposed to all standardized tests and believe that, used sparingly, such tests can provide useful feedback to schools, teachers and possibly students. We are instead concerned about their vast and increasing number and — just as disconcerting — outsized influence. The tests are no longer about feedback. The stakes attached to them now commonly include school funding and evaluation and closure, teacher pay and evaluation and firings, and of course student promotion and self-perception. It should come as no surprise that many schools have chosen to focus more and more of the school year on what is often called “test prep.”

Consider the case of two of our U.S. history teachers who sought to engage students in a case study about Fred Korematsu and the ways in which the rights of U.S. citizens have been suspended in times of war. At the last minute, worried about the impending Regents Exam, these teachers felt compelled to drop this important, in-depth investigation that would tap into student passions and diversity. Instead, they made the difficult decision to “cover” a broad and sanitized survey of U.S. foreign policy from the Monroe Doctrine to the Cold War.

As it turns out, the thematic essay on last year’s U.S. History Regents test was on American foreign policy, and the vast majority of our students passed the test. Did we make the right decision?

What does it mean to “test-prep” students as a means for teaching them to read and write? It means to teach without context or commitment, without personal connection or application. It means to teach using excerpted writing passages and scripted questions. David Coleman, architect of the Common Core standards that serve as the basis for the latest tests, shared his opinion that “as you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.” A curriculum based on standardized tests implies that our students’ lives, our lives, and the vibrant lives of our communities just don’t seem to matter.

In contrast, as teachers we recognize every day that there is no true curriculum without students’ lives, engagement, and voices.

One of the central characteristics of our school has been that all content and skills are embedded in real-world curriculums. We have a common understanding that students produce better work when they believe it is meaningful, when academic work spills into the world and back again. Our students make presentations to elementary-school students about bullying and to hospital institutional review boards about medical research proposals. They work with the Metropolitan Transit Authority on bus engine design, and with the Queens Memory Project on interviewing and preserving immigrants’ stories in Queens.

They may spend weeks on a single case study, developing nuanced understandings of complex problems. In this work, they are evaluated by school-based assessments that, in contrast to standardized tests, take the shape of diverse projects and presentations. Standards, including the Common Core, are a central part of our curriculum work, but they are only one of many considerations embedded in the work our students do.

As external pressure increases to sacrifice curriculum for the sake of “test prep,” all of us have been forced to make difficult decisions. We often hear policymakers tell us that a strong curriculum will result in strong test scores. This is simply not true. Standardized tests are, by definition, tests removed from student engagement and context; they require a particular kind of teaching that is antithetical to what most of us believe education should be. Many of us as teachers think of test prep as unprofessional and unethical. All of us believe curriculum should never begin or end with standardized tests.

This year, we took a stand on this point by subverting the evaluation of our teachers based on standardized tests. A new mandate in New York City — an indirect result of Race to the Top — requires each teacher to be evaluated by two standardized tests, most of us for at least one subject we don’t teach (the city recommended that schools evaluate their music teachers, for example, based on English and math scores). It also dramatically increased the number of tests and used tests that had never been piloted. We found this untenable.

When the city asked us to choose two standardized tests for each teacher as part of her or his evaluation, we all agreed to assign ourselves the same tests wherever possible. For one of the tests, all of our middle-school teachers will be evaluated on the state English test for all of our students. The result: students will take the minimum number of new tests, and teachers will all receive the same score. If our students fail, all of us will fail together. In this decision, we affirm our belief that we are a teaching community that collaborates and shares curricula, not a collection of individual good or bad teachers. We will not have our entire school community bound to a barrage of tests.

It is a small but important act of resistance.

So how might all of us, as citizens with a stake in our schools, resist the narrowing of curriculum and students’ lives? First, it is clear to us that our elected officials must hear from more than principals and teachers that creating new tests and tying more consequences to those tests cannot be the core of any education reform plan.

Second, some of us are also supportive of the opt-out movement that is growing across the country, wherein parents have creatively removed their children from standardized testing. In doing so, they refuse districts and states the data with which to evaluate students, teachers and schools based on standardized tests.

Some of us are more ambivalent about this movement. But we all know that to move forward, we must do more than say no to a system in which we do not believe. We seek systems where assessments can be effective at supporting students, systems where assessments are valid, reliable and fair. Based on our experiences, we have come to believe that these systems must be built through the work of individual schools, not through large-scale standardized tests.

We suggest that policymakers begin by moving resources away from standardized test creation and toward supporting the development of quality assessments in schools. Perhaps they might create incentives for schools to design their own school-based assessments, or encourage schools to move toward performance- and project-based assessment practices shared strategically among schools (see, for example, the New York Performance Standards Consortium of schools).

We cannot emphasize enough that any school’s capacity to develop is profoundly related to the allocation of school resources. Our school invests in lower student-teacher ratios, increased hours of teacher collaboration each week, and a week of paid curriculum development before the school year begins. Each year we struggle to find this funding, and we have often fallen short of our goal.

This week, as our school enters another season of testing, our sixth- and eighth-grade teachers have chosen to read to students a principal’s letter that one parent posted online: “We are concerned that these tests do not always assess all of what it is that make each of you special and unique … the scores you get will tell you something, but they will not tell you everything. There are many ways of being smart.”

Our students cheered. That they could be seen as individuals with interests and friends and dreams — not just as a set of numbers — deeply resonated with them.

At the end of the day, we hope students see their educations not only as a means to graduate, jumpstart their careers or get into college, but as a means to investigate, interact with and innovate in a rapidly changing world. As John Dewey reminds us, “Education is not preparation for life, but life itself.” We believe in a curriculum that is rich and personal — that is, for the living. To treat curriculum and schools otherwise is to demean education, reducing it to no more than training or indoctrination in a world that needs people to be so much more.

COMMENTS

Just a fantastic piece. Really sums everything up and I find myself agreeing with every point.

Also, the quote from that clown Coleman, what the heck? Just sad.

John Long

There is too much testing but state tests are necessary. In this piece where they talk about the SS teacher wanting to spend more time on one topic and maybe not completing the curriculum shows the need for tests so curriculum is completed.

The real issue is not the test, its that we can not agree with the curriculum. If we felt the curriculum covered what we wanted it to then we would say bring on the test. But with many thousands of teachers we will never agree on what needs to be covered, so the question is do we want no tests and teachers teach whatever they feel is important or tests where we know what is in the curriculum and that it is being taught.

Mark Messier

If I am not mistaken I believe that was the original purpose of the regents exams, to ensure a consistency of the material covered throughout NY State.

John Long

yes it was, also the purpose of all state tests. I’m a teacher and I can say in classes without a test the teachers do not cover or keep to the curriculum.

Laura Shapiro

I support your powerful message and applaud your courage to speak out with a collective voice.

Evan O’Connell

I take issue with the idea that curriculum is something to be “completed” or “covered.” As a teacher (and one of the co-authors of this piece along with 100% of my colleagues), I have found that curricular depth is always preferable to breadth, and my students report that they learn best this way too.

At our school, curriculum is something to be created, revised, loved, and developed, with our students’ interests and teachers’ passions in mind. Certainly we develop curriculum based on what we feel is important, but that doesn’t mean that we sacrifice essential content and skills for teacher whimsy. We deliberately organize our curriculum into “case studies” that go deep into content, and open up a world of inquiry unto a series of linked topics and provocative questions – depth leads to breadth and back again. The case study is the organizing principle and an entry point, but not the endgame of all that students will ever learn. To this end, at our school, a “unit” in 8th Grade Social Studies on the Progressive Era, the history of labor reform and unionism, the rise of industrialization, mass production of consumer goods, and capitalism and the origins of the American wealth gap, becomes a case study on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The case study is just the lens, but in the end, students are conversant on all of the historical content listed above. To me, that constitutes a complete curriculum, and it certainly doesn’t require a textbook or a survey course in order to inspire students to want to inquire about the world around them.

Anna O. Soter

Wonderful! Informed! Accurate! And yes, the need for balance. Education is useless unless the whole person is involved — we’ve all had tests of one kind or other – it’s the imbalance that you all address so well. This proliferation of tests implies that those who create laws that push them view the young as potential treadmill material, NOT the critical-thinkers, literate, thinking and visionary adults we would hope to have. I invite all supporters of tests of the kind our kids face now to TAKE these tests and see (a) how well they do on them; (b) what they actually learn in terms of ideas, knowledge, etc ; and (c) how well-educated they actually believe they have become as a result of taking these tests. The arguments you all have created are grounded and supported by compelling research — this isn’t just hot-airing. Thank you for your courage and your inspirational stand.

John Long

You state the problem well. Do we want 1000’s of different curriculum’s or one for the state. The state curriculum should give some leeway for case studies and teachers could choose the topic for the case study but in the end a defined curriculum should be made for the state. Allowing teachers alone do decide things leads to bias or brain washing our students. Schools have teachers not professors. Teachers need to be accountable to a set criteria and that is the curriculum, there will be enough time in college for professors bias and brain washing.

James

American kids rank number one in only one field internationally, self-confidence

I worry that the attitude expressed in this letter only exacerbates the problem.

The key is going to be parents and teachers TOGETHER standing up and saying: NO MORE! The sooner that day comes, the sooner we parents and teachers can get back to devoting all our energy to raising the next generation of Americans as best we know how — without having to keep fighting the privatizers who see our children only as widgets in their education factories!

Ma Lisa

Thank you for this wonderful message. I couldn’t agree more.

marion distefano

I think this is putting more pressure on already stressed out kids, What can be done by the parents to stop this testing?